Stairs

In the interpretation of dreams, Stairs is among the recurring images that traditional dream-books and modern depth psychology have alike tried to read. It is commonly interpreted as progress or decline, movement between levels of awareness.

Common readings

Climbing is usually read as effort and ascent, descending as a return to lower or hidden levels; either way stairs mark movement between states.

The reading of dream symbols has a long documented history, from the Oneirocritica of Artemidorus in the second century to Sigmund Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and the archetypal psychology of C. G. Jung. Such meanings are interpretive conventions of those traditions, offered here as ways the image has been understood rather than as fixed or established fact; in practice a symbol takes much of its sense from the individual dreamer and the setting of the dream.

Freud, in The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), is unusually specific about stairs: he reads climbing a staircase, with its rhythmic, repeated motion and the shortness of breath it can produce, as a disguised representation of sexual intercourse, one of a small set of symbols, alongside sticks, umbrellas and other elongated objects, he treats as recurring stand-ins for the sexual content his method holds dreams routinely conceal. This is Freud's own specific, attributed claim, not a general finding; Artemidorus, writing many centuries earlier, reads ascent and descent instead through the dreamer's actual social position, rising being generally favourable for someone seeking advancement and unfavourable for someone with a position to lose.

The most famous stair in the literature of dreams belongs to scripture. In Genesis, Jacob sleeps at Bethel with a stone for a pillow and dreams of a ladder, or in some renderings a stairway, set on the earth with its top reaching heaven, the angels of God ascending and descending on it. The dream is received as revelation, and Jacob wakes to declare the place the house of God. Whatever else stairs have meant since, the image of steps joining low to high entered the tradition there, carrying the sense of traffic between worlds.

Freud gave stairs a very different notoriety. In The Interpretation of Dreams he listed staircases, ladders and flights of steps among the typical dream symbols his theory read sexually, an interpretation that became one of the most quoted and most parodied claims of psychoanalysis. It belongs to Freud's system and is recorded here as his school's reading, not as an established property of stairs.

Between revelation and analysis sits the plain reading most modern interpreters use: stairs measure movement between levels, of standing, of understanding, of depth, and the dream's sense follows the direction of travel and the condition of the steps. Climbing with ease, labouring upward, descending into the dark and stairs that end nowhere are read as four different reports on where the dreamer is going.